Empowerment and Social Media, the Double Edged Sword.

Forrester’s article, The Future Of Interactive Marketing elaborated on the concept of the CORE directives. Standing for Customize, Optimize, Respond, and Empower it was impressed upon me that building relationship is one of the pillars that interactive marketing stands upon. Of the four directives, empowerment stood out as the foremost component in creating, sustaining and nurturing relationships between, within and throughout companies and consumers. The idea of empowerment is to give customers and employees the ability and desire to become advocates for your brand. These advocates not only market your brand through word of mouth, but they also drive innovation and influence brand decisions that line up with consumer interest. Empowerment is the balance of giving customers and employees control over your brand but maintaining enough control to preserve a brand’s image. Finding this balance has become extremely important with increasing influence of social media, both a great tool and a harmful institution.

Social media is a great resource for empowerment. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites are becoming more and more necessary for companies to use to promote their brand image and create those relationships with people they want to influence. An example of this Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign in which he used social media to great effect. But social media not only empowers advocates of a brand but also empowers critics. This is famously seen in Dave Carroll’s experience with United Airlines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Dave is a musician and he was travelling with United airlines when he noticed that the people loading his guitar seemed to not have any regard for its fragility. When he arrived at his destination he found that his guitar was broken and customer service would not help him out despite persistent demand for action. Eventually he decided to write a song about his experience and upload it to YouTube. The video became very popular and the brand image of United took a very serious hit.

This is a good example of a tool of empowerment, social media, can be used to take shots at a brand. It is imperative when using the CORE directives that a good balance of control be maintained. This is especially important in controlling how a company supports the image of the brand. Social media is a double edged sword that is prevalent in today’s marketing world. It would be wise to be aware of its dangers as well as its benefits.